Robert Casey Jr. went to Washington, but never really left Scranton
As Gina Frattali Sherman explains it, at the time it happened Bob Casey Jr. didn’t think it was particularly funny to take a hard left hook to the face from one of his best friends as he stood at the threshold to his apartment in Philadelphia.
“It was Halloween night, and a pretty sizeable group of us who all grew up in Scranton together were all getting together for a costume party, something we did every year after college and into our early professional lives,” explains Frattali Sherman, who has known Caseysince early childhood.
The doorbell rang and despite everyone saying “come in,” whoever was at the door did not budge. Their friends Cos and Brian went to the door. “There stood this large man with a green plastic garbage bag over his head and sickle in his hand and he looked like a cross between the grim reaper and Jason from the Friday the 13th movies.”
Brian knew it was Casey, but Cos didn’t. The man in the garbage bag wouldn’t say who he was and started grunting. Cos said, ‘Okay, buddy, if you don’t tell me who you are, you’re not getting in the house.’”
Casey kept grunting. “It was really pissing Cos off, and he got so angry he literally gave him a hard left hook right to the face,” she said.
It is a story that Casey repeats at the reunion they hold almost every year. Today he deadpans by saying he felt like a character in a Looney Tunes cartoon seeing stars after the punch. Back then, all he said once he came to was, “Why’d ya have to punch me?”
This is the second and final of a twopart series looking at Sen. Bob Casey Jr. and West Point graduate Dave McCormick, who in all likelihood will be the two men vying for what will arguably be the most important Senate race in the country. The race could decide which party will hold the Senate in January of 2025.
The contest is predicted to be one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, and one of the most over-analyzed races in the country, with reporters parachuting in from Washington D.C. and New York City covering it from a mostly horse-race political view. This series looks instead at the two men from the vantage point of the people and places that helped form who they are and, ultimately, why they are running.
Tightknit friends
It’s evident after spending hours talking to his friends from Scranton and walking around this Northeastern Pennsylvania city that Casey — who is almost exclusively called “Bobby” by his family and friends — draws deep from the tightknit almost clannish friendships that were formed on North Washington Avenue in the 60s and 70s when they were coming up.
It is an insular group of Scrantonites who all came from large Catholic families — most of his friends have at least five or more siblings — who all lived on a block lined with large houses set close together; the parents were middle class, the fathers doctors, lawyers, plumbers and skilled laborers.
The children relied on each other and did things that would make many of today’s parents whither — like hitchhiking home from high school, something Patrick Comerford said he and Casey did fairly often.
“Every day for two years Bobby and I and this other guy, Bob Breyer, hitchhiked home from school after basketball practice,” explained Comerford, who now lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
“Oh, yeah. In the rain, the snow, the mud, the typical stuff that you hear your parents lament about. We had to do it literally. And it was only the three of us. Everybody else was getting picked up, but that was not in our family’s nature,” he said.
And for good reason. “I come from a family of nine. He came from a family of eight and Breyer had seven brothers, so we had to figure a way to get home every single day. And we hitchhiked.”
The big complaint about Scranton Prep, he said — amongst the kids at least — is that they guaranteed students three hours of homework every night. “We were lugging textbooks with our dirty, stinky clothes in a suit or in a tie and a jacket in the mud and rain. It was great. That’s how I knew who he was. My son, who’s a Marine, says you understand people when you’re in the worst environment with them.”
The political and personal
Telling the story of Bob Casey Jr. outside of politics is challenging because many people in this state — especially those of a certain age — so closely associate him with his father, the late Bob Casey Sr., who served as the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995 and before that as auditor general from 1969 to 1977. He effectively embedded the Casey name in Pennsylvania’s political life.
Now he’s associated with politics on his own, because he went into politics early and had continued success. The junior Casey won his first statewide race at the age of 36, when he became state auditor general, an office he held for two terms, from 1997 to 2005 — when he literally walked across the state capitol to be sworn in as state treasurer, having won yet another statewide elected office.
One year after getting sworn in as state treasurer, he ran and won the U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Republican Rick Santorum. This year Casey is seeking a fourth six-year term in the U.S. Senate.
Casey’s only loss came in 2002 in a particularly vicious Democratic gubernatorial primary between him and Ed Rendell.
Casey is the fourth of eight children. His sisters Margi, Mary Ellen, and Kate came before him, and brother Chris, sister Erin, and brothers Patrick and Matt followed. Casey and his wife, Terese, have four daughters — Elyse, Caroline, Julia and Marena — and have been blessed so far with two grandchildren.
The Caseys lost their family matriarch, Ellen Casey, last August, when she died at the age of 91. In an interview I did with him for the Washington Examiner in 2020, he recalled a moment that illustrates the bond he shared with his mother.
He had received a call at midnight the night before the election, saying then-candidate Joe Biden would be making a surprise visit at at the Carpenters Union Hall in Scranton the next morning, then heading back to Philadelphia.
He went to the union hall, where Biden spoke in the parking lot, Casey recalled. “The whole event was probably 25 minutes. He went around and said hello to people and got some pictures.”
He asked whether Biden was heading anywhere near North Washington Avenue, and then did something he rarely does: he asked for a favor.
A favor for his mom
Biden also grew up on North Washington, so yes, he was going down the street. Casey asked him if he could wave to Casey’s mom as they drove by, since they’d be passing her house. Biden said yes — but then Casey realized he needed to give his mother a heads-up, so he sneaked off and called her.
“And I say, ‘ Mom, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Joe Biden’s going to stop by the house, and we’ll be there in about 20 minutes. Do you think you can be ready?’” At the time she was 88 and very meticulous about her appearance, he said.
She told him she had just got out of the shower, but yes, she’d be ready. Casey hung up, and then began thinking of all the things that could go wrong. What if the short notice left Biden waving at an empty porch? What if he’s rushed his mom so much that she falls in the process of getting ready?
Overcome with creeping dread, Casey begged permission to bail out of the motorcade a block from the house, sprinted ahead of the car escorting Biden, and arrived breathless at the front porch to find his mom looking flawless, unrushed, and casually waving to the next president of the United States.
“Of course, Biden gets out of the car to chat with her from the sidewalk,” recalled Casey, “then tells me, ‘God only created two perfect women. My mother and Ellen Casey.’”
Comerford calls that a classic Bobby moment: “His mom had a ridiculous influence on him because his father was gone into Harrisburg from when we were in sixth or seventh grade and traveled a lot,” he said.
“He learned how to do the right thing at a very early age — and I think that is a result of his mom and dad’s influence on him. Not necessarily the convenient thing, but the right thing.”
Comerford says he is acutely aware of the stoic perception of his dear friend and warns not to let Casey’s quiet veneer fool you into thinking he isn’t fierce: “When we were in high school, Bobby Casey always had to play against the biggest, toughest guy on the other team in basketball. He was a power forward, but he was also undersized and not as athletic as most of them,” he said. “You would think he’d shy away from confrontation. Instead, he relished it.”
His friend Henry Salusti is one of thefew of Casey’s friends who didn’t move away from Scranton. The two of them decided to start their own odd job business while at Scranton Prep. “We cut grass, we painted houses, we basically did whatever people wanted done around their houseor yard,” Salusti said.
They also worked construction for two more summers. Salusti remembers Casey wearing the same pair of brown corduroy pants to work every day in the summer. “Obviously his mother would wash them every day. But the same pair of brown corduroys to work in construction!” he says, still laughing 40 years later.
A defining moment
Frattali Sherman, who has known Casey since she was three and says she looked to him as a brother, goes still remembering the moment in high school that, for her, measures the depth of who Casey really is.
During the homecoming dance, her boyfriend at the time began behaving horribly towards her in public.
Frattali Sherman goes quiet. “I was mortified, embarrassed, humiliated and it was an incident that just never came into play in my entire life,” she says. Within moments, Casey quietly came up to her, and without a word, responded to the boyfriend before things got worse.
He took her out of the situation and walked her home. “I’ll never forget that walk home,” she says. “He had kept that promise kids havegrowing up to take care of each other and watch out for each other — and if there is a moment that definesBobby Casey, that was it.”